Clara Oswald’s normal, everyday life — here meaning her biological family (Mum, Dad, Gran, Linda), her quasi-adopted family (Angie, Artie, and Mr Maitland), or her job as a teacher — has been a part of 70% of her episodes so far. Not always a major part, but there is a continual commitment to showing her roots, that travelling with the Doctor is an addition to her normal life and not the whole of her life.
this is a genuine question: didn’t her mum die?? like, isn’t that one of those things that was supposed to be a part of her character and development that her mother died young leaving behind the book she bases her travels on?
i think the big problem people have with clara oswald’s non-doctor life is not that it’s necessarily non-existent, but that it doesn’t make any sense. why isn’t anything consistent? clara seems to have a whole family of her own, but she’s a live-in nanny to the maitlands and it was implied she “adopted” them because she wasn’t in touch with her real family (of which we assumed she had only a dad since she was at the cemetery at her mother’s grave). why aren’t we shown the emotional and mental impact of clara’s home life? even in the special which would presumably focus a bit more on clara’s home life, her family become second-rate characters with no discernible personalities or features other than an arbitrary story her grandma told to make the eleventh doctor’s last moments seem more poignant (i guess?). and what about the maitland children? how does raising them affect clara? does she get her maternal side from caring for them? and did she become their nanny because she didn’t want them growing up without a mother to make souffles, like her mother did for her when she was young? (if she died or not, which is apparently still up in the air.)
i believe this is a complaint we had of amy pond’s characterization as well. her parents were initially swallowed by the crack, leaving amy with an abandonment complex which the doctor unwittingly feeds by leaving for many years despite promising to return. but after the universe was rebooted and her parents were a significant part of her life, nothing at all changes whatsoever and her parents are never mentioned again. amy’s personality, her background, nothing develops at all, except in that one episode where they show up for her wedding day (again, as background characters).
we saw exactly which bits of her mother rose had picked up: she was headstrong, independent, stubborn. we saw how martha’s mother shaped her character: hard-working, self sufficient, cynical and suspicious of the doctor. we saw how donna’s character was affected by her mother, who was extremely critical of her daughter and put her down, who made her think she was unimportant and nothing special. however these characters were portrayed, their non-doctor life was apparent and obvious, and it grounded them as audience stand-ins. those of us who deal with the monotony of everyday existence, nosy parents, parents who put us down, parents who care about us, parents who make us who we are, whether we despise them or love them — that was us. we were rose and martha and donna. amy and clara are not given these defining extra roles in their life, only significant others (rory) or the doctor. that’s the complaint we put forward about clara’s non-doctor life.